Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has a conversation sparking post today (January 12, 2006) about the fate of Technorati the blog search engine. It was sparked by a print article in Red Herring* by Liz Gannes. Technorati after some technical shakiness in the early summer of 2005, has emerged as the search leader in blogosphere.
The Red Herring article also mentions 37 Signals, MeasureMap, Digg and YouTube as other possible options for Yahoo. Mike has proposed that Yahoo should buy Technorati. I agree with him, someone should buy Technorati, if not Yahoo then someone else should, this is the best blog search on the web. However, Yahoo's previous acquisitions of del.icio.us and Flickr which are heavily used by the blogging community and rely heavily on tagging functionality make them the best suitor for Technorati. It would be wonderful to integrate these sites systems resulting in a unified tagging system and a super blogosphere search engine with lots of bell and whistles.
One other speculative thought that has crossed my mind deals with harnessing the power of syndication. The front-runner in the field of syndication management is FeedBurner . They handle just over 115,000 publishers syndication feeds. The general population have yet to totally adopt syndication but as the masses continue to become more aware of the technology I feel syndication rights are going to be powerful as an advertising tool and de facto distribution standard. For example, imagine receiving your television, video, music and text content on demand via syndication feed. I could see the control of FeedBurner's technology as an attractive feature to one of the web superpowers. It will be interesting see if Yahoo, Google, AOL or Microsoft agree. It is enjoyable to speculate but it will be even more amusing to live the reality. So we will see what happens.
*A side note, for what it’s worth, I think Red Herring is hurting themselves by not having the article “Hungry Hungry Yahoo!” by Liz Gannes which sparked Michael’s post on TechCrunch and my retort on Somewhat Frank available on the web.
